


holding steady

by darcylindbergh



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguously Post-Everything, First Kiss, Gone Fishing, Growing Old Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Mood Without Plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2019-11-16 09:05:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18091448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh/pseuds/darcylindbergh
Summary: Sitting on a thick wool blanket at the end of a rickety dock side-by-side, legs dangling over the edge, a styrofoam container of wet, dark dirt between them, they’re fishing.*John knows what this is about. This is about finally figuring it out.





	1. fishing

**Author's Note:**

> Leslie, best beta babe, what would I even do without you.

It’s quiet. It’s peaceful.

There’s a fog rising off the surface of the lake, settling low around the bulrushes, curving around the bases of the old oaks along the edge. The sunrise has been a creeping, lazy thing, peaking only here and there through the clouds, and other than the occasional birdsong, there’s nothing but the sound of Sherlock’s toes, dragging slowly back and forth through the water.

They’re fishing.

Sitting on a thick wool blanket at the end of a rickety dock side-by-side, legs dangling over the edge, a styrofoam container of wet, dark dirt between them, they’re fishing.

John’s not dreaming, but he could be. It feels like a dream: out of place, out of time, a little bit. Sherlock is somehow incongruous with  _himself_  more than with this place, wearing faded denims John’s never seen before rolled up to the knees with a white button-up that might actually be flannel, sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows. His shoes and socks lay abandoned behind them on the slats of the dock; his toes go back and forth through the water, back and forth, back, so slowly, and forth.

Sherlock’s hair catches in the breeze, just the tiniest bit, lifting the curls from his forehead as he looks up toward the line of the treetops, and John wonders again what they’re doing here, but he still doesn’t ask.

Sherlock is still looking at the trees when his bobber dips, once, then twice, and goes still again.

*

It had been a soft awakening that morning, despite the early hour; almost coaxing, almost gentle, a sing-songing whisper and a cool hand on John’s wrist.

“John,” a voice had called. “John, we’ve got to get going or we’ll miss it.”

 _Sherlock_ , John had thought, turning toward that call automatically, searching for it through the twist of blankets, half-dreaming, half-awakening, but Sherlock called his name again, soft like that.  _Not a warning, not dangerous_ , John had decided muzzily, and then, startling him back out of sleep,  _Sherlock’s in my bedroom._

“We’ve got to go,” Sherlock had said, stroking his thumb over the back of John’s hand, just once. “Are you up?”

“Yeah,” John had agreed, without really hearing him. He had been thinking instead about that hand, broad and smooth, about the weight of it, about the stillness of it. He’d wanted to turn his hand over under it, press their hands together palm to palm. “’m up. Where?”

“Countryside. Nothing dangerous; wear something comfortable. I’ve got your toiletries together already, bring a change of clothes or two.” There had been a pause, and the hand on John’s wrist lifted away. “Two, I think.”

When John had finally blinked his eyes open, Sherlock had been standing in the doorframe, half-silhouetted by the light in the hall shining gold around him like a spirit, half-illuminated by the cold blue numbers on John’s bedside like a ghost. They had read  _3:46 A.M._  “Are you up?” Sherlock had repeated.

John had rubbed a hand over his face, wondering if he was seeing things. “Yeah,” he had said, a little more certainly, though a little more confused. “I’m up.”

*

He’d dressed in a daze, packed a few things without thinking them through, and gone downstairs to find Sherlock waiting with the same sort of Land Rover-type thing he’d driven before, way back when, idling at the kerb.

 _Where are we going?_ had been on the tip of John’s tongue, but he hadn’t asked it in the end. Instead he’d let Sherlock take his bag and herd him into the passenger seat, and wondered at how much it didn’t bother him not to know.

A year ago, two years ago, not knowing what Sherlock was up to would have made panic well up in John’s belly, oil-slick and black, but things had changed. John knew better than that now. John  _trusted_ better than that now, a solid, grounded sort of trust, so totally unlike the blind, worshiping trust he’d had before Everything.

(That’s the only way to talk about it really— _Everything_. Everything that had happened, Sherlock’s suicide and Mary’s martyrdom, each as fake as the other, Moriarty and Mycroft, two sides of the same coin, the drugs and the gunshots and the drinking and the baby. It’s easier to just say  _Everything_ , with the capital letter out front, than it is to try to spell out exactly what he means each time, the same way it’s easier to say  _the baby_ than it is to say her name, now that it’s all over.)

So John hadn’t asked, and Sherlock hadn’t volunteered. Instead he had tossed one of Mrs Hudson’s thick knit blankets into John’s lap as he climbed into the driver’s seat and said, “Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

“Wake me up if you start to get tired,” John had countered, already unfolding the blanket and bunching it up to form a little pillow against the window. “We’ll talk, keep your mind busy. Chemical experiments or something. That case last Tuesday, with the beetles. Popular fiction.”

“Popular fiction? Does that seem like something I know anything about?”

John had glanced over. Sherlock had been concentrating on the road, or so it had seemed, but Sherlock was usually concentrating on more than one thing at a time, and John had known just then that Sherlock was  _aware_  of John, of the angle of John’s head against the window and whether it would make his shoulder sore come morning, of whether turning the heat up a degree or so would help him go back to sleep.

It had been comforting, actually, in the way deeply familiar things are comforting, to know that Sherlock was aware of him, watching over him in some instinctive, deeply ingrained way, and for a moment John had wanted nothing more than to reach out and put his hand over Sherlock’s on the gear lever.

He had thought Sherlock might have been aware of that too, but he hadn’t done it, the same way he hadn’t turned his hand over upstairs. “You’re sure you’re going to be all right if I sleep?” he had asked instead, ignoring the thing about popular fiction.

Sherlock’s smile had twitched. “Yeah, of course,” he had reassured. “I’ll wake you up if I need it.”

So John had nodded, and he’d settled his head back against the makeshift pillow, and with the heat blowing warm on his feet and the smooth rumble of the car beneath him and Sherlock’s steady, watchful presence beside him, he had been asleep again before they’d even hit Marylebone Road.

*

He’d woken up again as the car rolled to a stop, and then he’d had to blink away the disorientation for a few moments.

It had still been mostly dark, with just the barest hint of dawn approaching through the blue and violet shadows. They were pulled over just off a two-track road along the edge of a long, winding sort of pond, lined with long grasses and tall reeds still frosted in the dawn. The heavy mist rolling off the water nearly obscured the line of trees on the opposite shores, ancient oaks and creaking pines that rose up like sentinels.

Through the grasses, John had just barely been able to make out a narrow dirt path leading to a rickety old dock, extending low out over the water.

It was quiet. Almost too quiet. They had sat in the silence, listening to the rumble of the engine as they watched the fog rising through the rushes and reeds. Sherlock had made no move to get out.

When John had looked back at him, he’d known that wherever Sherlock was, whatever Sherlock was concentrating on in that moment, it wasn’t the car, and it wasn’t the fog, and it wasn’t John. Whatever it was, it had made Sherlock look strangely young again, and a little lonely, even though they were wherever they were together, and John had wished he hadn’t slept the whole way.

“What are we doing here?” John had finally asked.

Sherlock had turned the ignition off and sat quietly for a moment, following John’s gaze out over the water. “Fishing,” he’d said finally.

*

Sherlock has a talent for doing the strangest things and making them seem so normal that there’s nothing one can do but go along. It’s dragged John loads of places—into absurd foot chases up and through buildings and back down, through locked museum back doors, down abandoned Tube tunnels—and while John hasn’t always been  _happy_  per se about where he’s ended up, Sherlock has always had a hundred reasons for dragging him there.

So when Sherlock turns to hand him a rod, baited line swinging precariously out over the water, John does the only thing he can think to do.

He takes it.

 _Fishing,_ John thinks to himself.

They’ve been at it for about an hour now, sitting in silence, watching the fog rise and dissipate in the growing sun. John’s had a nibble once or twice, but the hook doesn’t catch. He doesn’t even really know what they’re fishing for, trout or pike or whatever. They each recast out into the water every so often, just for something to do. Sherlock digs into the wet dirt of the styrofoam container with relish, baiting the hooks as though he’s done it a thousand times before. Maybe he has.

It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. The air is crisp and cool, almost delicate in the early morning sun; the light filters down to them through the fog.

It’s nothing like London, and Sherlock sits next to him, silent and still with his jeans rolled up to his knees, one foot trailing through the water, back and forth, back and forth, like someone else entirely.

John thinks he’s beginning to understand why they’re here.

They’re here because of the pill box.

It’s an unobtrusive thing. Sherlock keeps it on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet behind the mirror of the bathroom. It’s nothing special; it’s got a compartment for each day of the week, which Sherlock refills every Saturday night after John goes to bed. He’s inspected them, of course—there’s an innocuous little white pill, a bigger oblong one, and a soft-gel. The soft-gel’s just fish oil, of all things. John doesn’t know what the other two are; some other doctor must have recommended them. A vitamin, he suspects, and if he had to guess, just a regular aspirin, which makes John think about Sherlock’s heart, and about all the things Sherlock’s done to it, and all the things John himself has.

When John thinks about everything that’s changed, now that Everything is over, he thinks mostly about the pill box. About how he has his own bottles, locked away in a cabinet because one of them is an opioid painkiller. About how the cabinet is in Mrs Hudson’s bathroom, because one of them is an extra-strength sleeping pill.

About how even though they’re barely over forty, some days it feels much older.

 _Fishing,_ Sally Donovan had said to him once: an alternative to the rush, the noise, the uncertainty. An alternative to the strops and the shouting, to the drugs and the danger. An alternative to strange and unbelievable and improbable.  _Try fishing._

An alternative to Sherlock.

“I know what you’re doing, you know,” John says suddenly, breaking the silence.

Sherlock hums, but he doesn’t startle. He must have been paying closer attention than John thought. “Don’t know what you mean.”

“With the fishing. I don’t mind, you know. I’ll follow you fishing, if that’s what you really want to be doing. But I’ll also follow you down whatever back alleys and dead ends, too. I’ll follow you onto whatever crime scene you want to see, through whatever locked door. Into whatever, I dunno, really bad restaurants. Whatever mad, ridiculous adventure you can conjure up, I’ll follow you.”

Sherlock frowns. “I never take us to really bad restaurants.”

“ _Sherlock_.”

He looks away. “I’d have thought you’d have had enough of all that.”

Sometimes it weighs heavy on John’s chest, all the things that have happened, all this time that’s passed them by, all those years he’s never going to get back. All the mistakes he’s made. All the things he wishes he’d done differently or not at all. The chances he’s missed.

He looks at Sherlock, at his toes swishing back and forth through the water, scaring away any fish that might have been inclined to investigate their baits, and thinks about the chances he might still be missing.

John says, “Not as long as I’m doing it with you.”

Sherlock’s toes go still in the water, and he looks at John,  _really_ looks. John looks back, absolutely unflinching, and says, “You don’t have to prove we can have a quiet life, Sherlock. You’ve been  _dead_. We’ve been separated. Apart, from each other, and I just. I just want to live our life together now. Any kind of life.”

The breath hitches audibly in Sherlock’s throat. “I know we can’t sustain this forever,” he says.

“The life together, or the crime-solving?”

“I don’t know.” Sherlock looks away, squinting back out over the water. “Either, maybe. I’m not the easiest person to live with.”

John laughs. “Yeah, right,” he says. “You play the violin when you’re thinking. I remember.”

“Hush, I’m being serious,” Sherlock says, even though he smiles too, if only briefly. He sighs a little. “You know what I’m like, John. I don’t expect I’ll change much.”

“You’ve already changed,” John counters gently. “You change all the time. Your violin playing hasn’t improved much, I’ll admit, but you—you’re different, than you were when we first met.”

“Yes, well, when we first met I hadn’t yet killed—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.”

Sherlock doesn’t.

The wind picks up through the bulrushes; a bird somewhere trills into song. Out in the water, John’s bobber dips and wibbles, even drawing an inch or two of the line out, but then it goes still again.

John starts again, quieter this time. “I told you once that you were the best and wisest man I knew,” he says. “The most—the most human human being. I meant it then, you know, I really did, and then I spent two years being  _so mad_  at you, and it was so stupid, Sherlock, because I was so  _lucky_  to have you back.”

Sherlock shrugs; there’s new tension in his shoulders. “It was a perfectly understandable reaction.”

“Not for us,” John says, shaking his head. “Not the way we were. You asked me to believe in you, Sherlock, and I did, I did for so long, and then right when it mattered, I stopped. And we both paid that price, and we’ve both done some pretty awful things, so whatever you think  _you_  did that you have to keep paying for so that things can go back to the way they were—you don’t, all right? Debts cancelled. I don’t even  _want_ things to go back to the way they were. I want things to be the way they  _are.”_

Sherlock’s fingers tremble along the fishing line as he reaches out and adjusts it, twanging it a little.

“And what do you think is the way things are?” he asks.

John wants to take Sherlock’s hand in his. John has wanted to take Sherlock’s hand in his for a thousand years, it seems like.

Across the pond, the sun has crested over the tops of the trees. The dawn is filled with the sound of birds singing and frogs chirping, with the breeze and the warm smell of sunlight in the grasses, and Sherlock’s hand is cool when John finally reaches out to take it.

“I think that no matter where you go, what you do, I’m going to follow you,” John tells him. “I think we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. That’s the way I think things are.”

Sherlock’s quiet for a long time before his hand flexes in John’s, just the tiniest bit, and then relaxes. “All right,” he says.

“All right,” John agrees, then he grins, and bumps his shoulder to Sherlock’s. “Just all right?”

“Well,” Sherlock says, smile cracking at the corner of his mouth, “maybe a bit better than all right.”

“Yeah,” John says. “All right. Come here.”

There, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the end of a rickety dock, with a fishing pole balanced precariously against John’s knee with only one hand holding it steady, the other hand holding onto Sherlock, holding  _Sherlock_  steady, John leans in.

Sherlock inhales, sharp and small, and then John kisses him.

John kisses him, and the mist rising off the lake starts to dissipate in the morning light, and John’s fishing pole lists precariously to the side and he has to let go of Sherlock’s hand, startled into laughing, to catch it before it falls, and Sherlock takes both their poles and lays them down next to him on the ancient planks of the dock, lines still suspended somewhere out in the water, and he cups John’s face in both his hands and kisses him back.

After a moment, his toes start to drag back and forth again through the water. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Back and forth.

*

 


	2. wildflowers

_He’s still thinking,_ John thinks, watching Sherlock through the window over the kitchen sink as he meanders through the back garden. _He’s trying to figure something out._

Sherlock usually is, after all.

The cottage on the property is a simple, rough-hewn thing, filled to the brim with painted furniture and piles of soft blankets, the walls lined with decorative plates and antique prints of birds and flowers. There’s something a little motherly about the place, a little sentimental, a little hand-made. John likes it.

Sherlock likes it too, if the way he relaxes into it is anything to go by. He seems familiar with it, though he doesn’t say how, or why. John doesn’t ask.

The whole place feels like a secret treasure, a hidden sanctuary tucked away into an English countryside that feels more like wilderness than farmland. There’s something almost sacred about it, about the pillars of the trees and the vaulting arch of the sky, and as John watches Sherlock pass through the neatly trimmed garden and out into the meadow beyond, the long grasses and bright wildflowers reaching all the way up to his knees, John feels like he’s only just brushed the surface of everything there is to discover here.

Of everything there is to discover about Sherlock.

 _There’s something more he’s trying to understand,_ John thinks, watching Sherlock wrap his arms protectively around himself, turning his face up to the early afternoon sun. Something more than the confession of shared breath and soft kisses exchanged in the early morning mists. Something more than just the thing sparking between them. Something about the quiet, maybe, or the peace.

It’s nothing like London, and John isn’t so naive as to think that the  _finally_ of kissing Sherlock Holmes might mean they’d reached some kind of end. There’s nothing _final_ about Sherlock at all, and there probably never will be.

That’s the magic of him.

John wipes his hands on a dry tea towel, makes a fresh mug of tea, and follows Sherlock out into the back garden. _Tell me whatever you need_ , he thinks at Sherlock’s tall figure, the dark of his hair and the white of his shirt stark against the soft greens and yellows of the fields around him. _I’m listening._

*

Kissing Sherlock isn’t anything like John had imagined it might be, and John had imagined it might be a lot of different things.

He’d imagined it hard, and fast, and aching, crashing together in the fall-out of a case, in the aftermath of a nightmare; he’d imagined it tentative and gasping, barely brushing together at the bottom of the stairs in a moment of orbital gravity. He’d imagined it sheerly accidental, a quick goodbye kiss to the mouth in a moment of forgetfulness, and he’d imagined it in candlelight, seductive and passionate and careful, so deliberate, so intentional.

He’d imagined it standing in the sitting room, catching each other’s gazes in the mirror over the fireplace: what it would be like, just then, if he turned, if he took Sherlock by the wrists, if he asked, “Now?” He’d imagined it over the breakfast table, sharing newspaper pages back and forth, laughing into each other’s tea-tinted mouths, on the sofa, reaching across the distance between their two chairs.

 _If this were a crime scene instead of a cinema_ , he had thought, sitting in the dark next to a date he didn’t really want to be with, _if this were the sofa at home, if I put my arm around you, would you lean in?_

He’d imagined it eager and earnest and sweet; he’d imagined it sleepy, so soft it could almost not even be real. He’d imagined it relaxed, and stressed, and biting with anger, slow and lingering with disbelief and uncertainty; he’d imagined it in the shower, pressed up against the tile, slick-hot and desperate, and he’d imagined it on the front step, pressed up against the door, giggling, in the back seats of cabs and behind trees in parks and in Lestrade’s office and between the open doors of an ambulance, as a whisper and a reprimand and a demand and a giving and a total, unadulterated relief.

When Sherlock had been dead, John had imagined it like this: _I kiss you, and you remember it on the roof. I kiss you before I leave, even though I’m mad at you, and you remember it just before you let yourself fall. I kiss you, and you know that when I said machine, I didn’t mean that, I didn’t believe that. I kiss you, and you know what I do mean, what I do believe, and you know it never would have mattered to me if you were a lie because you know the truth._

He’d imagined that it would have changed everything, and maybe it would have, but maybe it wouldn’t have. It hadn’t mattered, because John hadn’t done it.

John had imagined it again for the first time in years, indulgent and furious and heartbroken, the night Sherlock had reappeared, breathing and standing and _laughing,_ god, he’d forgotten how Sherlock had laughed, and he’d imagined pressing Sherlock down into the black-and-red tiles of the Landmark, pressing him back into an alleyway because he couldn’t wait to get home, pressing him back into the dusty sofa at Baker Street, filling it again with warmth, with life, following through, following down, telling him, telling him everything.

And John had imagined that it would hurt, and John had not done it.

John had not done it.

For years, John had not done it, because in all the ways he’d imagined it, he’d imagined that they’d _understood_ each other somehow, that they had both known in some ephemeral way that this was it: this was their choice.

It couldn’t happen because there was a threat, or an ultimatum; it couldn’t be an alternative, a whatever-remains. It couldn’t happen just because it was a last chance, now-or-never. It could only happen because they _knew._ In that primal, elemental way only certain things can be known, John knew that whatever he might imagine, it would only ever happen because they both knew: that this is right, and this is now, and this is them.

Looking over at Sherlock on the dock that morning, John had finally known.

Kissing Sherlock could only ever have happened like that: in the light of the dawn, with their hands clasped together, coming home.

*

So they’d kissed there, with the sound of the water lapping at the dock, and as Sherlock had gathered up his socks and shoes, giggling a little, and against the side of the car, as though to reassure themselves that they were taking it with them, that they weren’t leaving this just for the pond.

They had been soft, quiet things, without hesitation but without any real urgency, either. Kissing just for kissing’s sake. Just because they had wanted to be.

It had felt, after all this time, like they had all the time in the world.

Eventually they’d managed to separate, all small grins and lingering touches, and Sherlock had driven them about a mile back through the winding copses of birch trees and pines before the two-track had given way to a gravel drive.

The cottage had been at the end of it, shadowed by an enormous oak and gardens bursting with fresh greens and marigolds and stalks of foxgloves, with bright blue shutters and a matching front door.

Sherlock had had the key in his pocket.

“What is this place?” John had asked finally, following Sherlock in and looking over the hodge-podge little sitting room.

“It’s a cottage,” Sherlock had responded cheekily. “You can put the bags in the bedroom through to the back—there’s just the one but there’s a lilo, ought to be fine.”

John had stared at him, at his little smirk, and looked over the room again, trying to find something in it that might identify what the place was, or who it belonged to. “Is it—Sherlock, did you—did you _buy a house_?”

Sherlock’s smirk had grown. “What, don’t you like it?”

John hadn’t been able to consider whether or not he _liked_ it; he’d been too busy remembering the three-hour drive from London, the utter seclusion of the pond, the lack of noise or traffic or people or anything other than birds and frogs. _Isolated_ , he’d thought. _Sherlock, utterly isolated._

Just the one bedroom, with a lilo.

“You should see your face,” Sherlock had said then, his smirk contorting into a full-out laugh. “You look like I’ve just shoved you out onto the street without so much as a how-do-you-do. It’s an _Airbnb_ , John, honestly, I’m not _that_ nutters.”

All the air had left John’s lungs at once. “An Airbnb—you—you’re an absolute tit, you know that?”

Sherlock had laughed again, and had gone over to take bags out of John’s hands, throwing them carelessly onto the sofa. “You should know better,” he had chided, taking John’s hands and kissing the irritation off John’s mouth. “Couldn’t have bought a house without you, could I?”

“No? Not an expert on house-buying?”

Sherlock had snorted. “As if that’d stop me. No,” he had answered, seriously then, “I couldn’t have bought a house without you because I’d be rather hoping we’d be buying it together.”

John had grinned then, wide and a bit silly. “Yeah,” he’d said. “All right.”

They’d kissed again, just there inside the door, and again in the kitchen, with Sherlock propped up against the kitchen table. Kissing to cheeks and to wrists as they put together a couple of cold sandwiches from what was in the fridge, as easily as if they’d always done it, as if they’d always been this way, slotting kisses into their usual domesticity as though it’d always been there, even though it hadn’t been tangible.

Maybe it had.

*

“Hey there, stranger,” John says, stepping through the meadow as he comes up next to Sherlock, following Sherlock’s gaze out over the rolling hills, toward the line of trees and the dip in the land where the fishing pond must be hidden from view. There are birds calling into the sky, bright and joyful, and the breeze is soft through the wildflowers, turning the heads on the tansies and the buttercups, the ox-eyed daisies and the cornflowers, ruffling them like the soft hair of raucous children, while the stately poppies look on, dotting the land with their coppery-red blooms, and the odd scattering of oxslips and wild parsley play in the undergrowth.

This is a meadow that has had time, John thinks. This is a meadow that someone has loved, that someone has wanted, that someone has raised carefully from worn ground back to fertile land.

“Beautiful out here, isn’t it,” he says, holding out his mug of tea for Sherlock to take.

“Yeah, it is,” Sherlock answers, though he still sounds a little faraway. John thinks _he_ looks beautiful out here, standing among the flowers as he raises John’s tea to his mouth and drinks.

Not surprising, John thinks, with a wry smile. Sherlock always looks beautiful when he’s thinking.

Sherlock always looks beautiful.

He could be thinking anything, just then. About wildflower types, grass breeds, soil pH levels. He could be thinking about the patterns of seeds, what he could tell about the history of this land from the swell of purple cornflowers on the slope of the hill, from the scattering of meadowsweet along the forest edges. He could be thinking about the ancient days when these lands might have been soaked in battle-born blood, or when these fields might have been forests, ancient and tall, or when this cottage might have been abandoned, derelict, forgotten and left to the birds to nest in its rafters.

He could be thinking about when it was revived, renewed, a love for the _what could be_ of something broken that must have created all this, the cottage and the meadow and all this peace and all this quiet, just so they could be standing here, breathing it all in.

John doesn’t think Sherlock is thinking about any of that, though. He thinks Sherlock is thinking about how this place feels _new_ , somehow, even with all the evidence of time in the land and the cottage around them. Like when the world was made.

He thinks Sherlock is thinking about the pill box, and their inbox bursting with cases, and the way lives can start over if only there’s love enough to raise them carefully from the ground.

It’s in his eyes, John thinks. That’s always been Sherlock’s giveaway: his eyes.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

Sherlock hums, taking another sip of John’s tea before passing it back. “Not enough milk.”

“That’s not what I meant,” John says, chuckling, and then Sherlock says, quick and interrupting, as though he’s about to lose the nerve to say it: “I’m tired.”

John pauses, his mug halfway to his own mouth. The breeze picks up a little, rustling through the grasses.

“I’m tired,” Sherlock repeats, softer this time, and he sounds like he’s surprised to have said it out loud, like he hadn’t quite known that’s what he was thinking until he’d already said it. His gaze darts away from John, suddenly unsure. “I’m tired, but I don’t know who else to be. I don’t know if it’s—” He breaks off, frowning, his mouth a tight, unwelcoming line.

“Go on,” John encourages. He doesn’t quite look at Sherlock, giving him the impression of privacy, but he takes a step closer too, an offering of support. “You don’t know if it’s—?”

From the corner of his eye, John sees Sherlock swallowing hard. “I don’t know if it’s been enough. All the—all the people, the cases. What if it wasn’t enough?”

John thinks about this, and he thinks about why Sherlock is thinking about this, and he bends to set the mug of tea down next to a bunch of daisies, rotating the base a little into the dirt so it stays put, and then he pulls Sherlock into him. Sherlock doesn’t unfold himself, doesn’t uncross his arms, but he lets John pull him to his chest, lets John hold him with both hands.

“Hey,” John soothes, “Hey. Of course it’s been enough, Sherlock. It would’ve been enough if it had only been once, yeah, and you’ve solved hundreds of cases. Some really important cases. You solved _my_ case about four times,” he adds, chuckling. “That’s enough for anybody.”

Sherlock doesn’t look at him, though, keeping his eyes on the grass, and John ducks, trying to find them, catching Sherlock’s gaze from underneath. His eyes, his giveaway eyes, are wet.

“Come on, you’re okay,” John says, pulling him a little closer, and Sherlock tenses and then crumples all at once, collapsing into John’s hold, hiding his face in the curve of John’s neck. “It’s okay to be tired, all right? It’s okay. You’re okay.”

They stand, for a moment, just standing, just breathing. John breathes deep and even, drawing one hand up Sherlock’s back and then down again, guiding his own breath, in and out, in and out, in, _slowly now_ , and out.

The sun is warm on the back of Sherlock’s neck, under John’s hand; the wind is cool. The scent of wildflowers washes over them, delicate and fresh, a little peppery underneath with the smell of grass and earth.

“This is really why we’re here, isn’t it?” John asks quietly, brushing a kiss into Sherlock’s hair. “You’re trying it on. Sherlock Holmes, out of London. Sherlock Holmes, someone else.”

“Little bit,” Sherlock admits, his voice still a little croaky. “ _You_ seem to like him, at least.”

“I like _Sherlock Holmes_ , full stop,” John corrects. “Doesn’t matter where he is.”

“You kissed me on the dock this morning.”

John almost laughs, thinking of all the different times and all the different ways he’s imagined kissing Sherlock. “I’d have kissed you at the breakfast table at 221B yesterday morning, too, if I’d thought it was the right time.”

“What made today the right time?”

“Mm. I think we just understood, right then, that this was it, didn’t we? We’re going to be together, and that’s the way it ought to be. Was it not the right time for you?” he teases. “Should I have waited?”

“John,” Sherlock says, and John can hear him rolling his eyes, “don’t be obtuse.” He pulls back to look at John properly, his eyes cleared if a little pink, his mouth softened, and he adds, “I thought it was the right time too. Well, bit late, maybe, but then I always am waiting for you to catch up—”

“Hush, you,” John says, grinning, and he kisses Sherlock, quick and light, just to prove the point.

Sherlock kisses him back.

The breeze picks up a little, making the grasses shift and shudder like waves as the trees rustle and sway. There’s a bee in the buttercups, bumbling and fat; there are birds in the sky, singing and soaring low over the wildflowers.

“You don’t have to be anyone else,” John says as they drift apart, between lingering kisses and soft breaths. “Solving crimes isn’t who you _are_ , Sherlock. It’s just what you do. And it’s been brilliant, and fantastic, and so will anything else you decide to do. So do whatever you want, all right? Try a few things on. Be a writer. Get a half a dozen dogs and drive us both crazy. Be a beekeeper, or a gardner, or take up knitting, if you like. Become a pirate finally.” Sherlock laughs. “Doesn’t really matter, Sherlock. Are you happy being a consulting detective? Are you excited, when a new case comes in?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and John wonders if he’s ever thought of it in those terms before, if he’s ever asked himself that simple question. _Are you happy?_ Someone should always be asking Sherlock that question, John thinks.

John’s going to keep asking it.

Sherlock shrugs, pulling back just enough to reach down beside them and pick up the mug of tea again. It’s probably gone cold from its seat in the cool, shadowed dirt, but Sherlock just wipes off the bottom a little and takes a sip before offering it to John, who shakes his head.

“I think,” he says, but then he stops, curling both his hands around the mug, holding it between them, and John realises that it was intended to put a little distance there, that it’s intended as a barrier of sorts. He doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t mention it. If it makes Sherlock feel safe, if it makes him feel protected, it’s up to him.

“I think it does, sometimes,” Sherlock says finally. “But every time we have a new case, I wonder if this is going to be the one. The one that takes you away.”  Sherlock laughs again, a little more self-deprecatingly. “I’m afraid, John. And I think . . . I think I’m tired of being afraid.”

Sod the mug, John thinks.

Sod the distance. It’s not _distance_ that’s protecting Sherlock. It’s not these wide open spaces that’s going to catch Sherlock when he stumbles, and it’s not these wildflowers that are going to ease Sherlock into unfurling.

John doesn’t know if Sherlock’s ever been this open with anyone, if he’s ever been this vulnerable before. The look in his eyes says no. The look in his eyes says that he’s afraid right now, and John is _done_ with letting Sherlock be afraid.

He takes the mug from Sherlock’s hands and pulls him closer, slipping one hand back around his waist until he can feel the shuddering breath trapped in Sherlock’s lungs.

“You don’t have to be afraid of that, you never have to be afraid of that again,” John says, pressing their foreheads together, closing all the distance until there’s none left. “Not of that. Never of that.”

“I don’t think you can know that, though,” Sherlock counters, but he lets John pull him in anyway. “Not for sure. There are a lot of would-be Moriartys out there, you know. Lots of would-be Marys, too.”

John shakes his head. “I do know it,” he insists. “I know it for sure. No one could take me away. No one could stop me from following you.”

“Well, a _bullet_ ,” Sherlock starts, but John cuts him off.

“ _Nothing,_ all right? I’ll outlive God if I have to. I’m yours now, Sherlock. I’m yours.”

Sherlock’s smile is a small, uncertain thing, but it’s honest, and it’s for John, and there among the wildflowers, it starts to grow.

“I’ve always been yours,” Sherlock says, and it sounds like acceptance, like believing, like, _yes, all right._

He lets John kiss him, gently, and if John pours everything inside him into making his kiss feel like a promise, like a vow, Sherlock’s feels like one too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Inspired by.](http://watsonshoneybee.tumblr.com/post/145235634229/do-you-think-itll-be-enough-theres-something)


	3. embers

There’s something captivating about Sherlock in the firelight.

John watches him from the doorway, sipping at a glass of wine and tracing the line of Sherlock’s body with his eyes: the tilt of his head, the line of his neck, the length of his legs. One of his hands is splayed out over his belly, where it moves ever so slightly with every breath Sherlock takes, slow and even.

He’s quiet. He’s peaceful.

He’d drifted off sometime after dinner to the sound of the old record player in the corner, which was still playing a soft, scratchy cello. John had been finishing up with the dinner dishes when Sherlock had disappeared into the sitting room, ostensibly to select a book or two to pass the rest of the night, but once John had poured himself another glass of wine and come to find him, he’d found this instead: a stack of books on the coffee table with leather covers and worn-out spines, and Sherlock, eyes closed, breathing steady.

One of the books is a book of poetry, and John imagines Sherlock reading it out loud into the hush of the evening, his voice deep and careful over the words, his eyes flicking up to John’s every so often when they really meant something. He couldn’t have imagined it before, but he can now.

He can imagine a lot of things he’d never imagined before, and as he stands there, watching Sherlock sleep, he imagines what the rest of their lives might look like.

It’s not something he’s thought about very much before. He tries to not really consider much further beyond the next day or the next week, relying instead on the general decision to follow Sherlock as far as Sherlock might let him. The rest of it, beyond that, has always seemed like a bit of a question mark on some faraway horizon, some unknowable shape of cautious assumption and hopeful possibility.

It had been uncomfortable to think about, actually. The unknowableness of it. Sometimes even frightening. John had not particularly wanted to examine all the wheres and hows and what-ifs of a life he couldn’t be sure he’d get to live.

But now?

It’s been fifteen hours and countless kisses since John woke up that morning, and everything is different now.

Now, he’s here, in some hideaway cottage with Sherlock’s hideaway heart in his hands, looking at a stack of books Sherlock might read aloud to him before leaning in to kiss him with poetry on his mouth. He’s here, watching Sherlock sleep by the light of the fire, watching Sherlock as he breathes in, and he knows the way Sherlock’s mouth tastes, the way Sherlock’s hands feel, the way Sherlock’s heart beats, as fast as a hummingbird’s, in time with John’s own. He knows how _solid_ Sherlock is, how irrefutably _real_ , and he knows now that Sherlock doesn’t actually want John to let him go.

He still doesn’t know everything, but now John thinks he might know enough, and all those endless, cascading possibilities, all those whethers and hows and whys and ifs, are all beginning to coalesce, to connect, taking the shape of something happening _together._

And looking at Sherlock in the flickering light, for the first time, John feels like he can _see._

*

He sees sunshine.

He sees London, brilliant in the morning light, the echoes of the city reverberating around them, the urgent hustle of steel and stone and glass carved through with the green swathes of open parks, warmed by cups of coffee and paper cones of sugared almonds and the smell of fresh cut grass. London, _their_ city, laid out before them, theirs for the taking.

He sees rare bookshops and antique markets, Sherlock’s fingertips trailing gently over creased leather and rusting bicycle handles, telling stories about people he has never met. He sees the dust caught in the shafts of light, turning secluded library corners into secret worlds for a kiss or two, and lazy afternoons spent meandering with nowhere particular in mind.

There are theatres, too, in his mind’s eye, and circus acts, archives and museums and half-forgotten records rooms, crime scenes and skate parks, rowdy pubs full of Yarders and silent rooms full of stately pomp: places to go, things to see, the beat of a thousand and more things to do. There are quiet mornings in 221B sharing pages of the newspapers, evenings guided by the drift of a violin in a window, exploring the offerings of rustic Italian trattorias and poncy Viennese cafes and dark-lit Chinese places, booths near the back, candles that burn themselves down on the tables until they nearly go out.

He sees Sherlock’s hand, in his.

He sees a chance to get away, a chance to slow down, a chance to finally take some time for just themselves. Paris. Cairo. Bangkok. He sees French villas in the countryside, long rows of grape vines that smell sweet and earthy in the afternoon sun, fruit that makes Sherlock’s mouth taste dark and luscious. He sees tall windows looking out over foreign skies, the heart-pumping excitement of the crowds in the marketplaces, the sound of different languages in Sherlock’s voice. Ancient wonders and modern marvels, tourist traps and hidden gems. Flowers tucked behind Sherlock’s ear that he’ll scoff at and blush over but won’t take out.

There are places Sherlock has been without him. There are places he has been without Sherlock. There are stories they could write, or re-write, or leave behind.

It’s up to them what comes next.

John sees: cups of tea.

He sees rolling green hills and gardens bursting with lavender and honeysuckle and wisteria, two pairs of slippers side by side at the end of a bed, the grey dawn filtering through lace curtains. Well-worn paths trailing along babbling brooks and clandestine retreats under weeping willows. The flair of Sherlock’s coat as he crouches down to see a toad or a mouse, the excitement in his voice as he learns something new, the shine of his smile as he looks back up over his shoulder. A writing desk pushed up against a window, sacrosanct space in a workroom overflowing with pictures and books and test tubes. A skull on a mantlepiece; fresh laugh lines around the corner of an eye.

A kiss good morning. A kiss good night.

John looks at Sherlock, laid out on an old worn sofa with a sag in the middle and throw pillows that smell like cherry pipe tobacco, and he sees an answer to every question he had ever wanted to ask.

John looks at Sherlock and he sees _home_.

*

It doesn’t surprise John, how easy it is.

Maybe it should. Maybe it should be shocking or astonishing or whatever else—how simple it feels, how smoothly their edges align as soon as they step together. Maybe it should be uncomfortable, how easily that familiarity moved into intimacy, how easily the distances between them pulled closed.

Maybe it should be, but it isn’t.

It’s just him and Sherlock, still themselves, maybe even _more_ themselves than they’ve been in a long time.

John feels like they’ve been reaching out toward each other for years, orbiting around each other, and it’s not so much that they are changed as it is that their fingertips have finally met across the space they’ve been trying to close for so long.

They’d spent the better part of the day exploring that space, that familiar distance, to see how it might move differently now. They’d wandered through the afternoon, finding paths through the wildflower meadows, curving along the edges of the trees. They’d ducked in between the branches, to where the air was still cool and dark, smelling of earth and of something undeniably _green_ , and John had kissed Sherlock up against the trunk of some great oak until they were both trembling with it and he’d had to step away.

Once they’d meandered back to the cottage, there had been tea in the back garden, sitting side-by-side with their shoulders pressed together the same way they’d sat that morning. They had talked about everything, and about nothing, and John had wrapped his hand around Sherlock’s, watching the lavender light of day deepen into velvet twilight, and thought that he was maybe, finally, beginning to learn how to listen to Sherlock’s silences. That he was beginning to learn how to hear the things Sherlock doesn’t say.

 _Tell me everything_ , John had thought, watching Sherlock’s profile in the gathering dark. _I’ll tell you everything too._

When the evening had wrapped itself firmly around the cottage, they’d gone back inside together, rummaging through the fridge for something to make for dinner. John had found himself making spaghetti carbonara while Sherlock had sat on the edge of the table, telling him a story about a dog he’d had as a boy, laughing and gesturing.

It wasn’t the laughter, though, that had made John pay attention. It had been the silence in the wake of it—the way Sherlock ducked his head and studied his hands when the story came to an end, the quiet turning thick and contemplative, a little melancholy in the low light of the kitchen.

John had stepped forward, back into that space he’d wanted to stand in for so long, and Sherlock seemed to open around him, letting him in. He’d stood between Sherlock’s knees with his hands on Sherlock’s arms and said, “It sounds like you loved him.”

“I did,” Sherlock had admitted, his eyes darting away, and John had wondered if Sherlock had ever said that out loud before. “But I thought—you know how children are, before they understand how everything really fits together. Things make sense in a different order.” He huffs a little self-deprecating laugh. “His name was Redbeard,” he says. “I thought that if I’d loved him better, maybe he’d have lived.”

“Didn’t he, though?” John had asked gently. “It’s been thirty years, and you still know his name. Isn’t that how we survive, in the end? Isn’t that how a life goes on?”

Sherlock had finally looked back at him. His eyes had suddenly seemed fragile, and he had taken a deep breath, and he had asked, “Did you ever say _my_ name?”

John had taken Sherlock’s face in both his hands then, brushing his thumbs over Sherlock’s cheeks, and he’d kissed Sherlock, just once, hard and a little fierce. “I said it every single day that you were gone, Sherlock Holmes,” he finally managed, resting their foreheads together. “I said it _every single_ _day_.”

*

And John is here.

He feels it enough that it seems worth saying out loud: _I am here_. Like he’s only just solidified in the world; like he’s only just figured out how to put all the pieces of himself together into one corporeal form. He doesn’t know where he’s been before this moment, but it doesn’t matter; the fire crackles in the grate and Sherlock shifts on the sofa, drawing attention to the slow waking going on underneath an amber glow of warmth and invitation, and this is the only place in the world John wants to be.

John can go over to him. John can sit next to him, and brush the hair off his forehead, and rest his hand over Sherlock’s on his belly. John’s allowed. John’s _wanted_. It’s that easy.

Maybe it always has been.

He sets his wine glass down on the coffee table and sits on the very edge of the sofa near Sherlock’s waist. Up close, he can study the line of Sherlock’s nose, the creases around Sherlock’s eyes, and auburn undertones in Sherlock’s curls, and John knows every detail of him better than he knows his own face, every line and wrinkle, every spot and blemish.

Sherlock’s not perfect. He’s better than perfect. He’s _real._

John leans in, slowly, and presses a kiss to Sherlock’s forehead, lingering there for a moment. He’s never kissed someone’s forehead like this before. It’s deeper than affection, John thinks, with the warmth of Sherlock’s skin, with the night-sky smell of Sherlock’s hair. It’s tender. It’s _profound._

When he pulls back, Sherlock is watching him.

The silence now is like a cocoon, broken only here and there by the sound of the fire, drawing them closer to one another. Sherlock’s eyes sweep over John in the flickering light with the bare suggestion of a smile around the corners of his mouth, and John hears every deduction Sherlock could be making without him having to say a single word out loud, because they all come down to one thing: _I see you._

John doesn’t have to say anything either. He kisses Sherlock’s forehead one more time, and that says it all.

There’s some brief shifting, then, the both of them getting comfortable. Sherlock scoots further up the sofa so John can sit with him, facing each other knee-to-knee, though he makes no move to pick up any of the books stacked up on the coffee table. Instead John passes him the glass of wine and together they watch the fire start to die out.

“Are you going to be all right?” John asks eventually.

Sherlock laughs quietly and finds one of John’s hand with his free one, taking a moment to explore John’s fingernails, old scars, the lines of his palm. “You know,” he answers, “When I decided to come up here again, I thought I was bringing you with me to make sure _you_ were going to be all right. I should’ve known you’d end up taking care of me.”

“Yes, well,” John says with a smile, watching their hands together. “We take care of each other, I think.”

“Mm. It’s . . . nice.” Sherlock’s fingers slip away as he takes the last sip of wine. He studies the glass for a moment, swirling some unseen remnant. “I was here alone, before,” he confesses. “Three weeks. No mobile service back then, no internet, no telly. I couldn’t go anywhere in case someone managed to recognise me before I could even get out of the country.”

Something cold settles into John’s stomach, but it’s not as sharp as it used to be. It’s more like pressing on a bruise so faint it can’t even be seen on the surface anymore—nearly healed, though tonight it’s here _for_ Sherlock, not against him: an empathetic understanding that only makes John want to hold him close. “When you died?”

Sherlock nods. “Three weeks,” he repeats. He laughs again, and this time it sounds rickety and frail. “I thought by then you’d be fine. I don’t know why I thought that.”

“Because you’re an idiot,” John says, as fondly as he can manage around the cold in his gut. He takes the empty wine glass out of Sherlock’s hand and sets it on the table again. “You weren’t fine either, were you?”

“Not really,” Sherlock admits. “I thought that because I was doing the logical thing, it would be easy to do. Leaving my life behind, chasing after Moriarty. Maybe it would have been once, but. I forgot to account for you.”

It’s Sherlock’s hand in John’s this time. “You missed me,” he says quietly, examining the nicks and burns left behind by reckless experiments, the violinist’s calluses, the blue veins in the wrist. The cold in John’s stomach shivers around itself, waiting for an answer, the last answer, to the very last question.

Sherlock turns his hand over and folds John’s hands into his own, carefully meeting his eyes in the low light. “I missed you,” he says. “I had no idea I was going to be so affected. I was _sure_ you weren’t going to be. But I was, and you were, and I—I missed you.”

John looks at him. His gentle hands, his cautious eyes. The fire is barely hanging on to flame, holding them both in eerie, flickering shadow, and it feels like just a step away now, just within arm’s reach—all that grief, and all that fear, and all that doubt.

John looks, and looks, and looks, and he hears and he sees and he listens and finally, he _believes._

“I missed you too,” John says, and then the last thread of cold in his stomach finally dissipates, letting John go, letting him breathe for the first time in years, and John hadn’t even known he was holding his breath until all the air comes rushing in. “I missed you too.”

And he pulls Sherlock in, Sherlock, who is warm and who is heavy and who is grabbing John back, Sherlock who is _alive,_ who is stuttering his own breath against John’s mouth, who is making that noise in the back of his throat, and God, Sherlock kisses in exactly the way John had always imagined he would: with everything he has.

 _I missed you_ , John thinks again, kissing Sherlock down into the sofa cushions. _I missed you every day for so long I forgot what it was like to not miss you, but this is it, isn’t it? Not missing you anymore._

_You’re here._

They’re here. They’re both _right here,_ and when John finally starts to get his breath back, when his heartbeat finally begins to even out where it’s thudding hard against Sherlock’s, he knows they’re never going to be anywhere else. Not in any way that matters.

“We’re going to be all right,” Sherlock says, minutes later, or hours, maybe. He’s ended up on his back, stretched out underneath John with one hand petting over John’s lower back as if to make sure he doesn’t slip away. His hair is a mess from being pressed into the cushions and it makes him look unbearably soft; John doesn’t bother to resist the temptation to slip his fingers into the curls. “Things are going to change, but we’ll be all right. We aren’t the men we once were, and I think—it’s okay. Good, even.”

He sounds like he’s testing the words in his mouth to see if they sound correct. John kisses them out of Sherlock’s mouth, like he’s accepting them, making them true. “You’re a better man,” he says. “A good man.”

“You are too, you know.”

Sherlock’s hand presses into John’s back as he says that, as though he can feel the tension about to unspool along John’s spine and wants to stop it at its source. John exhales under the weight of it and finds he has to look away.

“John,” Sherlock says gently, guiding his gaze back to Sherlock’s with two fingers on his chin. He cranes his neck up, kisses John softly. “You are a good man. You _are._ ”

His eyes, when John dares to look, are wide open, and John can hear the sound of his breath in the silence between them. “I think,” he says, a little shakily, “I think I could be. When I’m with you, it feels like I could be.”

Sherlock doesn’t answer that, not with words. Instead he kisses John again, and John can hear what he doesn’t say with every press and pull, with every give and take.

_You are. You are. You are._

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr!](http://www.watsonshoneybee.tumblr.com)


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